| :: Case Study: Under the Pump,
To compound the issues, not only was there a large main account, there were also many secondary accounts that had been created over time, not all of which ended up on my desk but were “out there” and often not getting paid. The first thing I needed to do was consolidate our billing. I had assumed this would be a straight forward process of finding all the accounts and getting the carrier to put them all on one nice big new account where I could feel confident I had my finger on the pulse. The only drawback was that carriers won’t consolidate accounts that have outstanding amounts owing. Now I faced the prospect of going back over my main accounts to reconcile any outstanding charges, and get a handle on the other accounts that were floating around. Did I mention we had two telco carriers? This was only the tip of the iceberg. I wanted to bring in hundreds of individual ISDN and PSTN services onto one account but I still needed to give each Cost Centre a report every month on their portion of the total billing as all telco accounts were paid centrally. As I mapped out the process and sequences I realised I needed to find all the accounts and go through them one by one. I had 2,900 Cost Centres trying to get to grips with their own finances and would need to be setting budgets within a few months. I couldn’t do this on my own. This was going to take time and I needed help! Communications Corporation provided a solution that had within a couple of months found all the accounts, negotiated consolidations with the carriers and found a multitude of redundant services, throughout the network. They identified duplication in our short range and long range pagers, a large number of inactive mobiles and all sorts of questionable rates. With credits, rebates, reduced expenditure on cancelled services and some correction in rates, Communications Corporation identified hundreds of thousands of dollars savings for our network. Communications Corporation provide this service to a number of national clients, taking their carrier billing data, analysing it and formatting into easy to read reports sent directly to the required hierarchical level, with summary reports going to the appropriate corporate level, including an inventory of services and equipment. This service incorporates fixed line, mobile, pager, WAN and Internet billing. Simon Edwards Simon left the Heath Service shortly after this and moved to work at Communications Corporation. For further information on the services that Communications Corporation provides, please visit www.commscorp.com. |
As the “Claytons” Communications Manager at the Melbourne Health Service (The real one had left and I was a temporary replacement), which incorporated a number of large hospitals, clinics and associated medical services, my constant challenge was getting telco billing information disseminated over 2,900 cost centres.